


A Gentler Ending

by damnslippyplanet



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Episode: s03e07 Digestivo, Fix-It of Sorts, M/M, Not You Hannibal, Okay Maybe You Hannibal, Someone Cheer Up Will Graham, alternating pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-30
Updated: 2016-08-20
Packaged: 2018-07-28 06:01:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 8,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7627843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damnslippyplanet/pseuds/damnslippyplanet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Perhaps what is called for is nothing so simple and clean as separation or joining.  It will have to be a field amputation, of sorts. Fast and brutal, and neither of them entirely whole afterwards. But, perhaps, survivable.   He will have his dogs and some shredded version of his life back.  Maybe he’ll move somewhere warm, and leave no forwarding address.  Maybe Abigail will stay in her grave instead of following him.  Hannibal will have music and art and blood, freedom somewhere far away.  If Will makes the cut clean enough, Hannibal may keep his distance. People have built new lives on less, surely.</p><p>Or: A little Digestivo fix-it fic because sometimes you just want your beloved characters to USE their WORDS and avoid several more years of pain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mokuyoubi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mokuyoubi/gifts).



> A belated birthday gift for mokuyoubi, who likes Digestivo-fix-it fic, fluff, and smut. I'm afraid Will _would_ insist on being rather melancholy and so this first bit is not the least bit fluffy, but I rather imagine the second chapter will provide the requisite smut, and two out of three ain't bad, I hope. Besides, who knows, perhaps a bit of smut will persuade Will to cheer up enough for a third chapter with some fluff in it. We shall see.
> 
> (Belatedly added author's note: I'm leaving that original author's note there because if you have ever imagined I have An Organized Creative Process, you may want to disabuse yourself of that notion by comparing it to how the fic turned out. But I am also updating the note to say that the lovely Sirenja [made a li'l gifset for this story](http://sirenja-and-the-stag.tumblr.com/post/148552118678/a-gentler-ending-by-damnslippyplanet-perhaps)!)

Will misses a few of the key details of the trip from Muskrat Farm to Wolf Trap.  Some of them will come back, over the days and years to follow.  Some never do.

He remembers:

That there was a car, and movement  _ away, _ and that much was good.

That he couldn’t understand a word being spoken and didn’t need to; he knew the voices and the cadences, although he’d never heard either quite so rapid and urgent.  The language was probably Japanese, but might as easily have been Lithuanian. Or Esperanto. Or Martian. 

That at some point he had tried to uncurl and every muscle in his body had screamed in protest.  Even so, he’d raised a clumsy hand and pawed at his own face to see if it was still there.  He’d tried to, anyway.  Hannibal had caught his hand and switched to English long enough to say, “You’re safe, Will. Try to rest. We’re taking you home.”

That he had tried to laugh at the equally implausible notions of  _ safety _ and  _ home, _ but no sound had come out.

That he had not let Hannibal’s hand go.

That he hadn’t asked why Hannibal had wedged himself in the backseat with Will instead of the front with Chiyoh.

That he had been too tired and drugged to do anything that required effort.  What had not required effort - what had come to him both instinctively and unwisely  - had been to let himself drift back to sleep.  In the backseat of a car driven by a woman who had thrown him off a train not long before, with his head pillowed on the leg of a man who had very recently tried to saw his skull open, Will had slept like a baby.

That, somehow, letting Hannibal and Chiyoh take responsibility for his safety had felt like the easiest of all possible options at that particular moment.

* * *

Of the many things that will be said about Will Graham in the years to come, in true-crime novels and internal FBI investigations and an unfortunate made-for-TV movie and in dive bars where his former coworkers will gossip and mourn, few people will ever claim that he was a man who made particularly  _ good _ life choices.

* * *

 

He wakes in his own bed with a fuzzy mind and an aching body.  The house is too quiet, the dog beds too empty.

It’s a matter of moments to determine that he still has a face, and that someone’s made what feels like neat work of a row of stitches for the worst of his injuries.  His glasses are placed within arm’s reach by the bed, and his bloody shirt has been changed for a clean one.  Of all the places in the world they could have gone, Hannibal’s taken him home.

These observations arrive all of a piece, as if it makes perfect sense that the same hand that injured him has sewn him together again.  This is what it would be like, perhaps, had he gone with Hannibal all those months ago.  Waking up every day torn and healed, endangered and cared for simultaneously. 

It would be no more sustainable than separation had been.  Impossible to live like that every day. Exhausting to imagine even trying.

There are no tolerable options and Will is so. Goddamn. Tired.  Hannibal will be around somewhere - he won’t have left without saying goodbye this time, it would be  _ rude _ \- but Will can’t face that conversation and so he lets sleep take him again.

 

* * *

 

When he wakes, his mind is a little sharper and it occurs to him that perhaps what is called for is nothing so simple and clean as separation or joining.  It will have to be a field amputation, of sorts. Fast and brutal, and neither of them entirely whole afterwards. But, perhaps, survivable.  

He will have his dogs and some shredded version of his life back.  Maybe he’ll move somewhere warm, and leave no forwarding address.  Maybe Abigail will stay in her grave instead of following him.  Hannibal will have music and art and blood, freedom somewhere far away.  If Will makes the cut clean enough, Hannibal may keep his distance.

People have built new lives on less, surely.

The voices outside on the porch draw to a halt, and the doorknob turns, and Will steels himself to make the first incision.

In the end, it’s not so difficult.  Every word of it is true, after all.  He  _ doesn’t _ want to think about Hannibal anymore.  He  _ isn’t _ going to look for him.  God knows he really does miss his dogs.

And as for  _ I’m not going to miss you, _ if it’s not precisely true, he wants to believe it will be true eventually.  It’s close enough to truth, and where have they ever spent their time but in this liminal space where candor sounds like a lie and falsehoods throb with honesty?

The wound is deep and clean and savage. Hannibal just sits there and takes it, the barest flicker of expression in his eyes. He absorbs the blow calmly and only Will would know that if Hannibal doesn’t stand immediately, it’s because he is waiting to be sure his legs and dignity will hold.

Wherever Hannibal goes next, there will be no one with him to know these things about him. The twisted form of tenderness Will somehow cracked open in Hannibal will never be given another chance to bloom. Will watches the barely-perceptible emotions flicker and fade, to be buried away in the darker spaces of Hannibal's mind, until finally Hannibal rises from his chair.

And so It’s not until he stands to leave that Will finds out that the cut was not quite deep enough, that somewhere there must still be a near-invisible strand of filament binding them, strong and flimsy as spider-silk.

Because Hannibal pauses just before opening the door, and even though he doesn’t turn back, the single thread snaps tight. Stretches taut and unbroken between them, sinks the hook deep in Will’s own throat, and rips the word from him unbidden:

“Wait.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s a bad idea, but no worse than either of the other paths Hannibal had seen before him branching from this conversation. If nothing else, it will be interesting - as always, something in him quickens at the promise of the unpredictable. At the promise of Will, ever marching off in directions entirely other than those Hannibal had prepared.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here we have another fine example of these two saying, "Sure, we COULD do something smutty, but WHAT IF we talked for 1200 words and then decided to go on a road trip instead?"
> 
> Ugh, these two. Keep the faith though, lovely readers and commenters. The cliff house has beds. Surely, having allowed them to have their road trip, they will be accommodating about whatever I want them to do once they reach their destination, right? ...right? Why are you all laughing?

Four letters can crack the world open, if they’re the right ones.

“Wait,” Will says, and Hannibal does. He tries to brace himself for whatever final blow Will plans to deliver. 

Will’s eyes are wide and startled, as if he doesn’t know himself what he’s about to say.  After a moment, what tumbles out is: “You could have left me there.”

“I could have.” 

“Why didn’t you?” 

Hannibal considers that carefully.   _I made a deal with Alana -_ but that’s a technicality. He made a deal to save Will, not to see him safely home and tucked into bed.   _If by some chance Mason’s mad-scientist scheming had worked, I could not have borne the thought of your face roaming the world without your mind behind it._  Closer.  

“You might consider it a debt I owed you,” he finally says. “For Florence.”

The twist of Will’s expression at that is entirely bitter. Hannibal feels it like a blade.

“Would you have regretted it, eventually?” 

Hannibal doesn’t believe that what he feels as _regret_ is quite the same emotion that his patients describe to him. He would, he is quite certain, have cherished for a lifetime the memory of eating Will Graham’s brain. And yet.  He would have missed their conversations: Will’s quick intelligence and his restless energy.  He would have felt the world irrevocably diminished by Will’s absence. Perhaps that would have been regret, of a sort.

“You’re asking me to speculate on what I can’t know,” he temporizes. “And so we’re back to teacups and time.”

Will leans back and closes his eyes. He looks tired and that thing in Hannibal’s chest, the dangerous tenderness that sits raw and uneasy there, stirs restlessly.

“I'm _asking,"_ Will says wearily, “if you’ll miss me.”

The two questions - _regret_ and _missing -_ are miles apart in Hannibal’s mind but clearly linked in Will’s. _Could you have lived without me? Will you think of me after you go?_  And to that, there is an easy answer.  There’s little reason not to be honest now, when he expects to leave Will with months - perhaps years, he is frustratingly stubborn - to replay these last moments before they speak again.

“I missed you for months. I don’t imagine that I’ll stop anytime soon.”  

“Bedelia must have loved that.”  There’s a little twitch that might, almost, be a smile at the edges of Will’s lips. 

“She was filling a place that had not been created with her in mind. I believe that at times the fit was an uncomfortable one.”

“I bet.” It _is_ a smile, albeit a pained and tired one. “Might not have fit me all that well either. It was for your idea of who you thought I was.”

Dangerous territory, there: a sudden skid out onto thin ice.  Hannibal shifts where he stands, looking for a distraction.  He glances out the window. It’s still light out. There’s time yet to change his mind and leave in truth, before the FBI comes for him. But not much time.

Will follows his gaze and allows the distraction: “They won’t be here for a while.” 

“No. But you asked me to leave.”

“And you take direction from me _so_ well.” Will's tone is acerbic. “Chiyoh’s out there somewhere, right? She’ll warn you if she sees them coming?”

“In theory. I think she’s growing tired of being my guardian. I believe she’ll stay until I’m safely away before striking out on her own, but it’s possible she’s left already.” 

“Good.”  It’s more vehement than Hannibal expected, given the sense he has that Will and Chiyoh aren’t precisely the best of friends.  “You can’t cage people like that, Hannibal. Not forever. She should have a life.”

“You two have been terrible influences on each other.”  It’s meant fondly, but he’s not sure Will hears it as such. He glances out the window again and then gestures back to the chair placed next to Will’s bed earlier, for the sheer indulgent pleasure of watching him sleep. “If you intend to keep interrogating me, may I sit?” 

“Yeah.”  Will waits, silent and watchful, while Hannibal comes back to him and takes his seat again, close enough to touch. To sink a knife into, if either of them were still so inclined.

They pass a few minutes in a silence more companionable than it should be. Hannibal thinks despite himself of the long dinners, the late nights by the fire, the incisive discussions and comfortable silences.  He should take hold of this conversation, but doesn’t understand what Will wants from him now, or where to go next.

Eventually, Will sits up straighter and looks Hannibal over, seemingly taking measure of his wounds. (The visible ones.  Hannibal is trying not to think about the brand on his back, and how unlikely to care for it properly the prison doctors will be, how it will scar more than is necessary.)  

“You’re not going to get far with a face like that,” Will finally says, a layer of bravado over something a bit uncertain. 

He’s not wrong; Hannibal’s looked in the mirror. “Staying out of public for a while will be necessary anyway. There should still be places nearby where I can go, until I can make other arrangements.” 

A beat or two, and then: “Is it where you kept her?”

 _Abigail_.

“I thought you didn’t want to know.”

“I want to know this.”  

Hannibal thinks of the cliff house’s empty rooms and nods ever so slightly.  “There’s a house, if the FBI didn’t find it. She was comfortable there. It will do for a few days.”

Another long moment of quiet and then he’s startled by sudden movement.  Will throwing back the covers; Will moving to get out of bed.

He doesn’t even have time to stand, Will’s just towering over him abruptly, dizzy and sick looking and somehow also as fierce as Hannibal’s ever seen him.  “Take me there,” he says, rough-voiced and urgent.  “I want to see it.”

That’s not in the plan. Not either of their plans - Will’s to send Hannibal packing, or Hannibal’s to turn himself in.  Hannibal doesn’t know how to respond except to say, “I thought you wanted me to leave." 

Will sways slightly, unsteady on his feet, and Hannibal resists the urge to reach out and steady him.  He’s not sure what would happen if he did.  He just watches until Will steadies himself and says, “I did. Now I want to see the house. It should be safe; Jack would have told me if he’d found it. I want you to show me where you had her.”

It’s a bad idea, but no worse than either of the other paths Hannibal had seen before him branching from this conversation.  If nothing else, it will be interesting - as always, something in him quickens at the promise of the unpredictable.  At the promise of Will, ever marching off in directions entirely other than those Hannibal had prepared.

“All right,” he agrees.  “I’ll go tell Chiyoh. Come outside when you’re ready to leave.”  He stands and moves for the door again, feeling oddly light, inappropriately happy.

This time when he pauses and looks back, Will doesn’t stop him. Will isn’t even looking at him.  He’s looking around his home, slowly and strangely.

Hannibal isn’t likely to see the house in Wolf Trap again for a long time, however this plays out.  He takes his own long slow look around it - the table where he tied the flies that sent Will away and brought him back again, the chair where he snapped Mason’s spine, the bed he so recently tucked Will into, allowing himself to scent Will’s sleepy warmth as he did.  He wonders what Will sees on his own perusal of the space; surely it’s an entirely different map of memories. Different mind palaces, sharing the same grounds.

Before he exits he tells Will, “Don’t take too long.  We’ll need to be gone before they get here.”  

Will doesn’t give any sign of having heard at all, and Hannibal lets the door slip closed behind him before he goes to look for Chiyoh.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s a dining table with chairs for far more people than Hannibal could ever have expected to host for dinner here. But the _effect_ would have been wrong with three chairs, Will supposes. His lips twitch traitorously into a smile at that, something blooming in his chest perilously close to fondness. It’s something like the feeling that drove him across an ocean.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh my god stop TALKING you two

The house perched on the edge of the cliff isn’t what Will would have expected.  It’s all sharp angles and exposed glass.  “No hiding places,” he says half to himself.

“Its existence is a hiding place,” Hannibal responds as he fishes a key out from under a stone bench.  “At night it’s the only light for a long way around.”   

Will holds his hand out for the key and lets himself in, leaving Hannibal to look out over the water.  He shuts the door firmly behind him and trusts that the message will get across: _I don’t want you in here. What I’m looking for, I need to look for alone_.  Not that he’s sure what that is, but he’s always worked better on instinct; he’ll know what he’s looking for once he’s found it 

Inside, it’s more like Hannibal’s home in Baltimore. Dark, rich colors, and across the room the sheet-draped bulk of a piano or a harpsichord.  He doesn’t even have to reach for the golden swing of the pendulum to see that scene - Abigail would have expected the trip back to Baltimore to be her last before the three of them left together.  They’d have put the house in order before the drive back, and taken anything important with them.  She would have helped Hannibal wrestle the protective drape into place over the instrument.  

Maybe she would have played something first - did she play?  Did she learn, here by the sea?  The thing in him that knows things he doesn’t want to know sends up a small flare of knowledge: yes, she would have learned here.  She’d have had all those months of his trial, and the lengthy cat-and-mouse game he’d played with Hannibal afterwards. She wouldn’t have had time to get _good_ , but she might have gotten entirely passable.  It would have been a way to pass the days.

He blinks the image away and continues his slow study of the house.  Hannibal keeps more kinds of wineglasses in his getaway house than Will ever did in his real home.  Of course he does.  There’s a dining table with chairs for far more people than Hannibal could ever have expected to host for dinner here.  But the _effect_ would have been wrong with three chairs, Will supposes. His lips twitch traitorously into a smile at that, something blooming in his chest perilously close to fondness.  It’s something like the feeling that drove him across an ocean.  

Before moving on, he drags the cover off one of the chairs and drops it carelessly to the floor, just for the sensation of messing something up in this house.  To make it feel less like a museum or a mausoleum.

Up the hallway.  A bathroom, two bedrooms.  Will supposes this house had been set up long before either he or Abigail had ever come into Hannibal’s life, and so the number of bedrooms is hardly suggestive.  Even so he lingers in the larger bedroom, and it’s not entirely out of a desire to delay exploring the smaller one.  He considers: Hannibal surely spent some nights here, slept in the neatly-made bed, probably has changes of clothes in the closet.  Nights when Will was trying to find rest in the uncomfortable arms of the BSHCI’s hospitality, Hannibal might have been here, sleeping the peaceful sleep of the remorseless.  That image comes easily to Will, too.  

He turns away. On to Abigail’s room.  There’s a window overlooking the water, a bed, a desk and chair - nothing to give him any real insight.  Not many traces that anyone lived in here; she probably took her things with her back to Baltimore.  Whatever things Hannibal had provided.  He wonders briefly whether there was a tug-of-war over that: the warring tastes of Hannibal Lecter and a nineteen-year-old girl.  Probably not; he’d have picked his battles to keep her agreeable, and her wardrobe choices wouldn’t have been among them.  

He’d thought that his ghostly Abigail might come to him again here in the house, but she’s been quiet since Florence.  He can only imagine her, and he can’t tell if his imagined Abigail was happy here.  At first she would have liked the peace and being away from public scrutiny, but eventually she’d have wanted more.  She’d been too young and seen too little of the world to yearn for the safe harbor of a lone light on an empty shore for long.

Unable to conjure her in more detail, he moves on.  Further down the hallway there’s a small study and beyond that, a door that opens onto a staircase leading down to the basement.  He lingers in the doorway for a long moment.  It might just be a basement, or it might be something much worse.  The photographs of Hannibal’s basement in Baltimore rise unbidden to the surface of his mind.  It might be that, all over again.  Or a wine cellar. Knowing Hannibal, it’s both.

And he does know Hannibal.  If he forgets what the man is capable of, he’s wearing the scars to remind him.  He doesn’t need to know what’s at the bottom of this staircase for that.  He breathes through that decision, then shuts the door.  The sound echoes through the house, empty but for his own breath and footsteps.

He allows himself one glance out toward what appears to be some sort of stone patio, on his way back to the front door.  It’s an open, empty space.  One could, perhaps, play fetch with dogs out there if one were very careful not to send the sticks hurtling in the wrong direction.

That image, too, strikes him with startling clarity.  They probably wouldn’t have stayed here long enough for dogs, but if they had, it would have worked.  He would have been _happy_ here, in Hannibal’s small kingdom by the sea. If they had made it here together, before everything had slipped sideways, back when they had both worn fewer scars.  

It’s dangerous information to have, and he cradles it close as he exits the house to find Hannibal sitting on the bench. His always-careful posture has an extra element to it - he’s rigid with the effort of not turning to watch Will’s progress through the house, through the big glass windows.

Will casts a glance around what he can see of the grounds before taking the other end of the bench.  It’s nearly full dark, and he can see what Hannibal meant - he can’t see light from any other buildings.  They might be alone together at the end of the world. So many things would be simpler if they were.

“Well?” Hannibal’s tone is light, but his posture still speaks of stress. Will’s better at reading him than he used to be, or Hannibal’s worse at hiding himself away.

“It’s more like you inside.  Not as many creepy antlers as I’d have expected, though.”

That startles a small smile from Hannibal.  “I wasn’t here often enough to warrant a full effort at interior decoration.”

“It’s nice.  I should have known your getaway shack would be worth six of my house.”  A beat of silence, then: “Would we have come here together?” Before Hannibal can respond, he adds, “No teacups. Just… were you going to bring me here?”

“That was the plan at one point.  The plan kept changing.”

There’s nothing to say to that, really.  They sit together a while longer and Will resists the urge to lie down, to curl up on the bench with his head in Hannibal’s lap as they’d been on the car ride from Muskrat Farms.  It’s a terrible impulse for a multitude of reasons.  The urge to reach out and touch Hannibal on the shoulder, to see whether that coiled tension would relax or ratchet up even further, is even worse.  He resists that one, too. 

Eventually he says, “They’ll be looking for us by now.  They’ve probably already been to my house.”

“Likely so. They’ll have talked to Margot and Alana already.”

“You don’t sound concerned.”

“They would have found this place before now if they were going to.  It will be safe for a few days, at least, and then I’ll be gone.  Getting you home tonight will be difficult but perhaps you’ll let me drop you somewhere else.  You can call Jack and spin him whatever tale you like. I won’t contradict you if I’m caught.”

The thought of another silent and uncomfortable drive back, and of watching Hannibal drive away from him, taillights fading, that invisible cord snapping taut between them and Will with no way to call him back, this time - no.  Will doesn’t want that.  At least not tonight.

“I really am tired.  I don’t want to tell any more lies.  I don’t want to talk to Jack. Or to anyone, for that matter.”

“Including me?”

Will shrugs.   _Yes and no,_ is the answer to that question.  He’d rather talk to Hannibal than anyone else right now, but crawling into a cave and staying silent for five or ten years seems like an even better idea.  At least he couldn’t make anything worse that way.

“Are you going to make me walk home if I say I’ve run out of words for the night?”

“You appear to be my guest, and that would be inexcusably rude.  Are you staying the night, then?”

Will considers the likelihood that they can pass the night together without any more bloodshed. The chances aren’t great, but Chiyoh probably wouldn’t have let them come out here alone if she didn’t think there was at least a chance they’d both come out the other side alive.  And her judgment is probably better than either of theirs, at the moment.

He can return to Wolf Trap tomorrow, none the worse for wear, with a tale of imprisonment and escape.  Or not.  Hannibal would let him stay.  Hannibal would probably let him stay after he makes his own getaway.  He’d let Will haunt his abandoned house, alone in the empty rooms with his own ghosts.  The thought has a certain appeal.

“Yeah,” he says, with almost the last of his words.  “Yeah, I guess I am.”

And then he’s out of words entirely.  He stands when Hannibal does, and lets Hannibal take him by the elbow, and follows him inside the house that would have been theirs in a slightly different world. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal returns the raised-glass gesture, sorts through and discards a half-dozen options for a toast in the blink of an eye, and settles on: “To better hospitality than Mason Verger’s.”
> 
> It’s the lowest possible bar, but maybe that makes it exactly the right height for them to hurdle together.

Will in the cliff house is more jarring than it should be, given that Hannibal had once intended for him to be here.  But that had been long ago and far away, a possibility given up months ago, and Hannibal is not a man who looks back.  He was not expecting this to be a space they ever shared, outside the confines of his imagination.

He would probably be  _ slightly _ more surprised to find himself standing in the middle of the open living room with a unicorn or a leprechaun than he is to find himself handing Will a glass of wine in that same space.  But only slightly.

“I’m afraid all the best vintages were at my house,” he says as Will takes the glass from him.

A Will too tired for more than the bare minimum of speech is not a Will unable to communicate; he is still a quick mind and an expressive face, gestures eloquent despite the injured shoulder.  He tips his glass in a sardonic salute before draining half of it.  He used to be better about savoring his wine.  Perhaps that was part of the act.  Even with months to consider it, Hannibal’s still not entirely sure he’s right about what was, and wasn’t, a lie.

Hannibal returns the raised-glass gesture, sorts through and discards a half-dozen options for a toast in the blink of an eye, and settles on: “To better hospitality than Mason Verger’s.”

It’s the lowest possible bar, but maybe that makes it exactly the right height for them to hurdle together.  He’s almost sure the glint in Will’s eyes is amusement.

“If you don’t need a hand in the kitchen, I’d like to lie down for a while.”  Will’s voice sounds worn, threadbare.  

Even as Hannibal’s reaching for one of the larger knives to keep by him while he cooks, in case Will’s less tired than he looks, he lets himself imagine the dinner he would  _ like  _ to serve.  There would be meat, lightly sauced to avoid obscuring the flavor.  Will didn’t ask him  _ not _ to serve meat, and he lets warmth creep through him at the notion that Will might eat whatever Hannibal provided. What would one more dinner be, among old friends? The thought sustains him during the creation of a vegetarian meal that falls entirely short of his imagined one, conjured from shelf-stable pantry goods.  It will be sustenance, and little more.  It will have to do.

When he’s satisfied that his efforts are the best that can be done with the limited means available, he goes looking for WIll.  He expects to find him in one of the bedrooms but finds him in the study instead, halfway through a slim leatherbound volume. He looks up and holds his place with a fingertip when Hannibal appears in the doorway.

“Couldn’t sleep.  Turns out I have a whole bunch of new nightmare fodder.”

“I can give you something for that after dinner, if you want,” Hannibal offers, and then tries to bite the words back too late.  Because of course he does.  Of course he has an array of drugs in the house for entirely non-medically-approved purposes, and of course Will won’t take them from him, and will wonder and not ask whether he gave them to Abigail to coerce her cooperation.  

Will goes tight and sad around the eyes, and says nothing except, “I don’t want that.”  His mouth works as if he might elaborate further, but he doesn’t.  

Hannibal’s forgiven. There's a catacomb beneath the memory palace now where Will’s forgiveness echoes continually amid the skulls of their shared dead. But that doesn’t mean Will’s forgotten, or ever will.  Hannibal’s lost the knack for doing this particular dance with Will, across the minefield of things that must go unsaid.  It’s rare for him, and so almost precious, to feel this clumsy and out of step.

“What  _ do _ you want, then?”

Hannibal’s words hang awkwardly in the air between them, and he realizes it’s entirely possible he’s never actually asked that of Will before.  He watches Will come to the same realization, in a series of small muscle movements almost unnoticeable to someone who hasn’t made a pastime of memorizing and recreating all the moods and motions of Will Graham’s face.

Will looks away, around the room as if there might be an answer there, slipped between the books or hidden away in the desk drawer with the passports and the account numbers.  The room fails him and he looks back to Hannibal with a twitch in his jaw that might be nerves or determination or sheer exhaustion

“I don’t like any of my options,” he says, and there’s that twitch again before he goes on. He still sounds tired but he also sounds  _ present, _ right here in the room with Hannibal in a way he hadn’t been in Wolf Trap, closed off inside his head.  “I want to find something new to want.”

There’s a softness bleeding through those words, something Hannibal hasn’t seen in Will since...well. Probably since right before the linoleum knife.  It tugs at a counterpart in Hannibal, a vulnerable thing deep in him that answers only to the sound of Will’s voice.  He tries to ignore it; it’s not at all clear that this is a moment when softness is allowed or safe.

“The world is full of things to want.”    _ I’d have shown them to you.   _

“My last trip into the world didn’t end particularly well.  I’m starting to think the world and I don’t agree with each other.”

“We’re both alive.  It could have had a worse ending.”  There’s something Hannibal could say here, he knows, that would fit the delicacy of the moment.  He’s just not sure what it is.

But somehow, maybe that was the right thing, because Will  _ smiles. _ Or anyway he gets halfway to a smile, before it turns into a head-shake and he says: “I think you might be the most optimistic person I’ve ever met.”

It sounds like  _ God, it’s annoying  _ and somehow also like _ I missed that about you. _  Hannibal decides to respond to the tone, rather than the words themselves. 

“I really did miss you, Will.”

Will looks at him with an expression Hannibal can’t quite interpret, and then says: “Yeah. Me too.  I made the mistake of trying to explain it to Alana once.  It didn’t go over well.”

“I would imagine not.”

“After we were both out of the hospital.  She found me in your kitchen and wanted to know what I was thinking about.”

“Did you tell her?”

“Not really.”

“Will you tell me?”

Will pins him with a gaze that shouldn’t be so blue in such dim lighting. He appears to be considering whether to answer.  He tilts his head to one side as if he’s listening to his better (or his worse?) impulses, and then suddenly he’s up out of his chair and moving.

So that’s how this ends after all.  Hannibal’s almost disappointed; it’s such a predictable endgame, to be back here again.  Somewhere up a sleeve or in a pocket, Will must have a knife from the kitchen, or perhaps he took a gun from his home, and it will end here.

He’ll fight it, but if he loses, better here than in Mason Verger’s pigsty.  Better at Will’s hand.  One part of his mind is already cataloguing what meager resources the room might provide as weaponry.

Except that Will halts as soon as Hannibal tenses.  He reads Hannibal easily, his sudden fight instinct and the runaway impulse to save himself at all costs.  Will always did, once the blinders were off.  

Will reads him and holds up a hand and sounds exasperated as he says, “Jesus Christ, Hannibal. Stop it. Aren’t you tired of this?”

Hannibal’s racing heartbeat doesn’t know whether to slow down because the threat appears to have been no true threat, or to speed up even further. Because Will is close, and moving closer still, and Will’s raised hand finds its way to Hannibal’s less-injured cheek with a gentleness that stings more than any knife would have.

“I was thinking about the moment right before,” Will says, and he’s so close Hannibal feels the words more than he hears them.  As if he can feel the vibrations of Will’s voice through the fingertips on his face.  “I knew Alana was out there on the ground, and I knew they were coming for us, and Abigail was scared, and there was so much blood on you, and nothing was ever going to be all right. And even so. There was about half a second just before, when I felt like everything might somehow be okay.”

What is there to say to that?

There’s nothing to say.

Hannibal would  _ like  _ to say that he’d felt it too, before the knife had slid through Will’s flesh.  He’d like to be able to confess to even a half-second of belief that the teacup was only wobbling in mid-air and might be caught.  But he hadn’t had that half-second.  His universe had already been thoroughly cracked by then, his veins pumping with what he supposes now must have been rage or betrayal, although neither is a feeling he knows well.

Will gives him a moment but doesn’t seem surprised when he doesn’t have an answer.  Of Hannibal’s many failings, surely his inability to talk about feelings doesn’t rise to the top five of Will’s personal list.  

So Will just shakes his head ever-so-slightly, and sighs so close that Hannibal can feel the air stirring, and says, “I guess that’s what I want.  I would really like to forget what a disaster everything is for a little while, and feel like everything might be okay.”  And then he leans forward to close the remaining inches between them

It takes a few moments for Hannibal to catch up.  There’s a second after Will kisses him, when he thinks:  _ Dinner getting cold. _ He thinks:  _ Exhaustion and injuries. _ He thinks:  _ Chiyoh knew this would happen, it’s part of why she didn’t come. _

And then he just thinks:  _ Will. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To mangle a Tony-award-winning instant classic of American musical theatre: _talk less, smooch more_.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Take what you need,” Hannibal says, and it’s a dangerous invitation. Will needs a lot of things from Hannibal and some of them are unspeakable.

Will comes back to himself with a racing pulse and a hitch in his breath that might be desire or might be a sob, and he can’t breathe, can’t breathe, can’t --

He _can_. It requires closing his eyes and focusing to the exclusion of everything else - the warmth of bodies pressed close together, the taste of Hannibal’s lips on his own, the ache of arousal thrumming through him, whatever Hannibal is saying in a low voice he tunes out - but he can breathe.  

One measured breath after another, Will sorts out the pieces of himself that were on the verge of flying apart.  He finds his edges again.  The palms of his hands, flat against Hannibal’s chest and shoulder, are still distinct and Will’s own, when he stops to remember that they are.  His breath is ragged but _his_ , staggering to a different rhythm than Hannibal’s.

He can breathe, and he knows who he is again, by the time he opens his eyes and says, “Shit.”

Hannibal is preternaturally still underneath him, pressed down into his chair by Will’s weight across his lap, near-frozen.  Uncertain what he did wrong, probably.  A small vicious thing in Will thinks _let him wonder._   Get up, walk out of the room, sleep it off, leave Hannibal twisting in the wind.  It would be easy.  It would feel good, in a different way than the last several minutes have felt good.

Instead he wills the impulse away and presses a hand to the base of Hannibal’s throat to feel the galloping pulse there.

“This is a lot,” Will finally manages to say.  “It’s okay, it’s good, it’s just...a lot.”

“Too much?”

Hannibal doesn’t move under Will’s hand, where it presses down but doesn’t - quite - affect his breathing.  It looks like trust, but how could it be?

“Maybe. There’s a lot of noise in my head.  Too many different things I want.”

“Tell me about them.”

“Why, so you can psychoanalyze me with one hand down my pants?”

Hannibal tips his head back further, baring it to Will’s touch slowly, so Will can feel the slide and stretch of skin and tendons under his hand.  He doesn’t remove the hand that is in fact still down the back of Will’s pants, cupping Will’s ass, holding him in place.  Will doesn’t particularly want him to.  

Hannibal swallows, a deliberate bob and glide of the muscles beneath Will’s hand, before he says: “So I can give you the things that you want.”

And Will doesn’t know how to answer that, because he’s not sure he wants to be _given_ anything.  One part of him does, maybe.  A part that would like to just say _be gentle, for once.  Don’t hurt me; I’m tired of hurting_.  And lie back, and let Hannibal make him feel good.  But then there’s the part of him that just wants to _take_ , and hurt, and rip Hannibal to shreds between his teeth; the part that feels no amount of forgiveness spoken repays a blood debt owed.  There’s also the part of him that got confused in the first place, that’s having trouble telling where Hannibal ends and Will starts and which desires are actually Will’s own.  Maybe it’s himself he wants to hurt; maybe it’s Hannibal he wants to be gentle with.

Night of painful honesty or not, there’s only so much Will’s able or willing to say out loud.  He just shakes his head slightly and says, “I’m having a little trouble with boundaries.  Where I start and you end.  Getting mixed up. What else is new?”

He means it to be wry.  It comes out something else, cracked and raw.

Hannibal shakes his head and Will’s hand falls away from his throat, so Hannibal can bring up his own hand and touch Will.  Will’s face, his shoulder, a light touch skimming down his arm and back up again, over his chest, a brush over his nipples that sends a tingle down his spine, down to his waist and his thigh.  Hannibal’s _outlining him_ , he thinks, as if he were one of the man’s drawings.

Everywhere he touches, Will feels alight and alive in the wake of Hannibal’s fingertips.  He feels his own body being drawn back to his attention, as if it were something he’d lost long ago and is surprised to have found again.  

 _Oh.  Here I am_.  

Here are Will’s edges; here his skin, his bone and muscle and blood and sinew.  Somewhere in his marrow he is making new cells every moment; beneath his stitches his skin is knitting itself back together.  Every instant, he is becoming something new.

Will’s heart beats relentlessly, broken and blooming and wanting what it wants, utterly beyond reason.  

He could cry with it.

Instead he lets go of his hold on Hannibal’s shoulder to unbutton the few buttons still holding his shirt together.  He slips the shirt off to fall neglected to the floor, and raises his chin slightly, a command without words.   _Do it again._

And Hannibal does.  Just that, just touch. With hands and then with lips when Will doesn’t protest.  Over and over Will’s skin, tracing all the accumulated scars and marks of a lifetime.  Finding Will, and learning him, and showing him to himself. _This is where you are. This is how I see you.  This is what we make together_.  It goes on for a long stretch of time, until they’re both of them breathing too hard and wanting too much to keep it together any longer.  

Will knows who he is now, he’s vibrantly aware of every inch of his body. And so he _could_ figure out who says _I need_ and who says _yes, please, oh_ , and who reaches for his zipper first.  But he just doesn’t care, not in this particular moment.

It’s been a long time since he touched anyone else this way. Longer still since it was a man. But it hardly matters, not with Hannibal panting under him and straining up into Will’s hand, wrecked and rapturous.  This isn’t going to take much for either of them; finesse does not appear to be on the menu.

Hannibal tries to wrap his hand around them both but Will bats his fingers away.  “I need,” he says, and can’t finish the thought, but it’s enough.  Hannibal drops his hand to Will’s waist instead and just pulls him closer, where they can rut harder against each other and into the circle of Will’s fingers.

 _I need to feel this_ , he might have said if those circuits were working properly.   _I need to know this is happening.  I need to know I was the one who did this to us both_.

“Take what you need,” Hannibal says, and it’s a dangerous invitation.  Will needs a lot of things from Hannibal and some of them are unspeakable.

But right now he just needs _this_ \- a few more moments, the rhythm they’ve caught together, and the way Hannibal’s mouth muffles Will’s moan when they kiss again.  And again and again, until Will shudders and comes and loses track of himself again for just a minute, dissolving into little more than sensation and static.

It doesn’t take much more for Hannibal to follow him over the sharp edge dividing _not quite enough_ from _too much_. In the aftermath they’re both loose-limbed and messy and leaning into each other for support, as if they might fall over without propping each other up.  Which they might, if Hannibal’s feeling anything like Will is.

Several quiet minutes go by, entirely consumed by lazy, light tracing of fingers over bared skin, small nonsensical sounds, and slower, less frantic kisses.  It’s the most peaceful Will can remember feeling since he set foot on shore again, and he’s not in any hurry to shatter the moment’s soap-bubble fragility.  Finally, when his body informs him that it is no longer willing to hold this particular position and he’s really too damn old to be climbing into people’s laps to make out like a teenager, he sighs and starts trying to disengage without making even more of a mess of them both.

Hannibal follows him upright and they survey the disaster of each other for a moment, before Hannibal takes over.  He disappears into his bedroom and comes back with pajamas for Will, and then down into the basement to wash their clothes.  The basement, apparently, contains a washer and dryer.  (Which doesn’t preclude it also containing god knows what murder weapons. Will’s trying not to let oxytocin cloud his brain entirely.  He’s not sure it’s working, because it’s all he can do not to follow Hannibal down the hall, not to let him out of his sight.)

Dinner’s a lost cause, and Will’s unsteady on his feet, tired and overwhelmed and unnerved by the rapid pace of the last few days ending so abruptly in - well.  Whatever this is.  He opts for a quick shower and bed.  

Neither of them acknowledge Abigail’s closed door, the bed or the ghosts that sit behind it.  Hannibal makes up his own bed with fresh sheets and they act as if it’s the only bed in the house. There’s some awkwardness around finding a way to lie together that works for Will’s injured shoulder, but otherwise it feels entirely easy. Like something they’ve done before and might do again, tomorrow night and for a thousand nights thereafter.

Before he can fall asleep, Will props himself up on one elbow and leans in for another kiss.  Just to see if he can be that even when it’s not about frantic, driving need.  

Hannibal is all shining eyes when they part, more than the moonlight can account for.  But he waits for Will to lie down again, so Will can’t see his face any more, before he asks, “Does this change anything you said earlier?”

He could answer.  He thinks he knows the answer.  But he’s very possibly not in his own right mind at the moment, exhausted and injured and hungry and still fighting that urge to follow Hannibal around like a puppy, and this is too important to get wrong.  So he just closes his eyes and says, “I need to sleep on it. Ask me in the morning.”

He can feel the disappointment radiating off Hannibal, but all the other man does is sigh once and settle himself down warmly against Will’s side.  

It’s arguably an improvement in their ability to communicate about difficult things.  No one’s getting stabbed tonight, anyway.  He closes his eyes and tries to ignore the nearly-tangible sensation of Hannibal watching him as he falls asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SWEET BABY JESUS, FINALLY, A LITTLE SMUT, SIX THOUSAND WORDS LATER.


	6. Chapter 6

 

_Coda_

Early morning: the boat creaks, a seagull cries, Will wakes with a vague sense of something left undone.

He lies for a long dreamy while, pinned under the heavy weight of Hannibal’s arm and content to drift that way, until he finally feels movement at his back. Hannibal makes a vague grumbly noise of displeasure at being awake and presses his forehead into the back of Will’s shoulder as if to hide from the sunlight, and Will grins and presses himself backward in response.

“Weren’t you a morning person once?”

There’s no response other than a faint tightening of the arm slung over him. The ocean rocks the boat gently, a motion he hardly even notices anymore except when lying in bed. He tries again.

“I’ve been lying here thinking about teacups.”

“I thought that was a forbidden topic.” The words come out muffled, half-smushed against his bare skin.

“Not if I bring it up. Hear me out. All that time you used to spend thinking about the teacups, how far back did you mean to rewind them?”

He gets only a curious sort of noise in response, and a kiss planted between his shoulder blades. Waking up, then.

“Stop trying to distract me. It’s a serious question. Just to the exact moment of the break, or further back? You could go back and never buy the teacup. Or farther back, keep it from ever being made. Hell, rewind time far enough and maybe you could stop anyone from ever inventing the teacup.”

“Maybe we should just stop tea from being discovered and avoid the entire issue.” Every few words are punctuated with another kiss to the back of Will’s neck or shoulders. Hannibal sounds decidedly uninterested in the hypothetical alternate universe in which tea was never invented and thus heartbreak avoided centuries later and an ocean away.

“Mm. Sure. We’ll just change the history of plant evolution. Anything else you want to change while we’re in prehistory? Any dinosaurs that particularly offend your sense of aesthetics?”

“The dinosaurs are fine, Will.” Hannibal finally sits up enough to peer over Will’s shoulder and see his face before he asks, “Why are we talking about this? Nightmares again?”

“Not exactly.” It hadn’t been a nightmare, not really. Elegiac, not scary. “Just wondering if you’re bored yet. If you miss your old life much.”

Hannibal considers that, doing Will the courtesy of a careful response. But his voice is light when he answers: “I miss my wardrobe, but it would hardly suit our current life. I miss the opera, but there are recordings. My kitchen. I do miss that.”

“You miss killing.” It’s not a question.

“No more than you miss your dogs, my dear.” Hannibal smooths his hand over Will’s stomach with that, as if to comfort, to take away the sting. Because what that means is: _yes. I miss it like a vital piece of myself, it wakes me in the night aching like a phantom limb._

This life isn’t without its sacrifices for either of them. Their own small world, out on the ocean, keeps them away from temptation and harm. They behave themselves on necessary trips to land. Hannibal seems content to cook and swim and to paint each changing shade of blue he finds in the ocean and the sky. Will is content, more than, to fish and read and crew the boat.

They haven’t found the bottom of their shared hunger yet; there are entire days they barely leave their bed except to make sure they aren’t drifting into unsafe waters.

Hannibal tugs at Will until he goes over on his back, where Hannibal can rest an ear against the steady thump of Will’s heartbeat. He lies there listening for a moment and then says, “Perhaps we’ll leave the dinosaurs and the teacups alone. I find I'm no longer willing to accept the risks that might come with reversing time.”

Will threads a hand through Hannibal’s hair, lifting the silvery strands and watching them fall again. Gravity and love: irresistible forces, not reversed easily or without consequence.

“I dreamed about Wolf Trap,” he says, finally. “I dreamed you left me.”

“I didn’t.”

“No. You didn’t.”

They drift quietly, far from shore, until Will’s growling stomach drives them out of bed and into another day.

* * *

> _Your dreams are filled always with acrid smoke, decaying charred rubble, the skeletons of school children, and you want them to stop. Swim away into the nuclear glow of sunset, O Godzilla, whose skin matches the mossy tide, to a gentler ending, away from the island of sorrows._
> 
> _~Jeannine Hall Gailey, “They Wish Godzilla a Happier Ending”_

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [A Gentler Rewind](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12056745) by [Petronia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Petronia/pseuds/Petronia)




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